Stop Twitter Spam

Trending Topics spam on Twitter has been a hot topic lately. Spammers are loading their tweets up with trending topics, resulting in a polluted stream of tweets and the risk of clicking on a link that infects your computer with malware.  And recently, pranksters have been trying to game Trending Topics by repeatedly tweeting inappropriate terms.  Twitter responded to this by removing the offensive terms from the Trending Topics leaderboard.

Here are a couple of ways to work around this problem using third-party solutions.

1) Clean Tweets

Clean Tweets is a clever Firefox toolbar add-on that filters out Twitter Spam from Twitter search results. Here’s an explanation of how it works from the Clean Tweets web site:

Clean Tweets does various actions when you use Twitter Search at either Search.twitter.com or when you access search from within your web based profile.

It automatically deletes any tweets from accounts that are less than 24hrs old (or how long you specify). A lot of search spam comes from churn and burn accounts that spam until they get flagged so doing this cuts down on a lot of spam. (don’t worry legit newcomers you can show up tomorrow).

Anyone tweet that mentions 3 or more (or what you decide) trending topics in it will not show up. Most spammers also list every trending topic they can find after their little spammy speal so this is a good way to cut down automatically as well.

Manual Delete Option. For the spammers that sqeak by or just list one trend at a time you can click an X by their avatar and it will delete their tweet and remove them from ever showing up again. (don’t worry if you accidently delete your friend you can get them back in your settings)

It is pretty simple but in the days we have been testing it, it is very effective and cuts down on a lot of spam. The best part is it doesn’t slow search, or change anything, it is like the spam was never there.

It provides a safer, more enjoyable Twitter Search experience.

If you click on the Clean Tweets toolbar, you can change the filtering parameters.

For more coverage on Clean Tweets, check out this post on Mashable.

2) almost.at

almost.at is a good option if you’re trying to follow conversations on Twitter about an important or popular event, for example: the Protests in Iran, a tech conference that is generating a lot of buzz, etc. almost.at filters out spam by only including tweets from people who are at the actual event.  This almost guarantees that you won’t see any obvious Twitter Spam on the almost.at site.  And there’s an added benefit of not seeing dozens of re-tweets from people who aren’t at the event.  Of course, this means that you’ll be missing out on potentially insightful commentary from people who are tracking the event closely but not physically there.  And the content on almost.at is limited to a handful of events each day, so this isn’t a general solution for all trending topics.  I really think that people will turn to these types of curated services more and more if Twitter doesn’t come up with a better way to filter out the spam and noise resulting from excessive re-tweets.

For more details about almost.at, listen to this recent episode of the Net at Night podcast, which includes an interview with David Cann, the guy behind almost.at.

Are there other tools that you’re using to filter out Trending Topics spam?  Share your solutions in the comments.

Updates:

• VentureBeat has a great post today called “Who rules real-time search?  A look at 11 contenders“.  The eleven contenders are: Scoopler, Topsy, OneRiot, TweetMeme, almost.at (mentioned earlier in my post), DailyRT, Twazzup, FriendFeed, Twitter Search (formerly Summize), Collecta, and CrowdEye.
• Robin Sloan (Current TV) has assembled a useful site called  Super-filtered #IranElection info for the easily overwhelmed (via Boing Boing).  This is another example of a curated site, aggregating tweets and other social media content from trusted resources.